The Supreme Court of Canada announced this morning that it has granted leave to appeal the decision of the Alberta Court of Appeal in Yugraneft v. Rexx Management. This decision has been the subject of considerable discussion among arbitration practitioners: as was discussed several months ago on Slaw, the case raises a number of difficult questions about how international arbitration and Canada’s treaty obligations in that respect interact with local procedural law – specifically limitation of actions – when seeking to enforce the award, and more generally whether foreign judgments and arbitral awards should continue to be treated, . . . [more]

Necessity breeds invention. From Procter & Gamble to IBM to Federal Express, from nylon to photocopiers to the electron microscope — some of the world’s most well-known companies and products were born in past recessions and depressions. The current economic crisis will be no exception — when times are tough, forward-thinking people will find ways to do things better. That applies especially to the practice of law.

Is your law practice or firm one of the profession’s leading lights of innovation? Have you or someone within your firm with vision and courage led a groundbreaking effort to practice law differently? . . . [more]

Way back in the early 80s Wendy’s hamburger chain ran a TV commercial that featured three old ladies exploring a competitor’s “really big bun” and the relative absence of meat; one of the women had a deep, harsh voice and used it repeatedly to bark out: “Where’s the beef?” Now, in this day of supersizing, the question isn’t so much about the size of the patty as its provenance. That goes for just about all forms of food, our concern fuelled by dangerous additives, e coli, listerosis, and the lack of control over suppliers distributed across the globe.

As of . . . [more]

Working with the Working Group on Lawyers and Real Estate, the Law Society of Upper Canada has prepared guidelines to help lawyers avoid becoming the tool or dupe of unscrupulous persons when dealing with real estate transactions involving powers of attorney. These guidelines are available here.

With the prevalence of real estate fraud, it is important that real estate lawyers implement practices and procedures in their firms to recognize and fight fraud. In recent years, powers of attorney have been used in real estate transactions to perpetrate fraud. Forged powers of attorney have been used to fraudulently mortgage properties . . . [more]

Connie wrote a couple of days ago about the submission deadline for the upcoming CRTC network neutrality / network management / traffic shaping hearings. Since then, some submissions have been made public that illustrate how important this hearing will be, and how it will affect Canadian consumers and content providers.

The federal Privacy Commissioner has filed an well written submission that discusses the privacy aspects. The Commissioner’s blog post on the topic starts with:

What would you think if you wrote a letter and it could be opened up by a postal or a courier service before it reaches its . . . [more]

♫ is it possible
to be so confused
at this point
and its rational that its logical
there is no point in denying
give yourself a chance, you might like it

we must make connections
we must make connections
we must make connections
we must make connections… ♫

Lyrics and Music by Criteria (Steve Pedersen, Aaron Druery, A.J. Mogis, Mike Sweeney).

Web 2.0 is defined by Wikipedia as follows:

“The term “Web 2.0″ refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design, that aim to facilitate communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. . . . [more]

Kim Nayyer’s column on the use of law reform agency materials for legal research has prompted me to talk about how the Law Commission of Ontario thinks about this very issue. Use of law reform commission materials by others can be a major source of a commission’s reputation. . . . [more]

I’ve put together a website, LawTop, that uses Google News to bring you the most recent law-related stories from Canadian mainstream English-language news sources. You can choose whether to see 10, 25 or 50 of the latest stories, and whether you’d like the headlines only or the headlines and a brief excerpt. As I say on the main page, this is really a simple exercise because Google does all the heavy lifting — and the only reason you’d want to use LawTop instead of Google News directly is because LawTop’s got a handy and consistent set of terms to . . . [more]

If you were an early bird like me and on your computer circa 5:30-5:45 a.m. EST this morning, or on the other side of the world when this would be a reasonable time of the day, you too may have participated in the “Great Gmail outage of February 2009.”

Yes, Gmail was down, and mass panic ensued it what became commonly known as Gfail.

The hysteria could probably best be observed first hand on Twitter, where thousands of users, myself included, screamed in protest and paranoia.

@sandersonjones probably said it best,

Google, I know you’re listening.

As Slaw readers will know, one of the themes that recurs here quite frequently is the role of publishing and books in this culture of rapid technological change. Jason Epstein has a few thoughts on the matter, some of which he shared in the keynote at the recent O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference 2009 in New York. Epstein is someone you would very much want to listen to on the subject: now 81 years old, he created the Anchor Book imprint in the early 50s, launching the trade paper format; in 1963 he co-founded the New York Review . . . [more]

From the Law Librarian Blog today.

Personally, I believe that the move toward digital law journals is inevitable. I equally believe that librarians and publishers have to work together to ensure that information is available to those who need it, when it’s needed, and supported by a sustainable business model. Starting with the law schools is, I think, a good move.

I like that the language of the Durham Statement includes the word “open” – as a librarian who serves the public, it does me no good to have restrictive licenses keeping my users away from the information they need. . . . [more]

One of the great wonders of the web is the ability it affords us to glimpse the world from different perspectives by reading current papers from around the world.

Starting with today’s Hindu, a great paper from Chennai, we find the following stories:

Bloggers not entitled to any special protection for expressing critical views, Supreme Court of India holds:

Bloggers may no longer express their uninhibited views on everything under the sun, for the Supreme Court said they may face libel and even prosecution for the blog content. Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan and Justice P Sathasivam refused to . . . [more]